Mike Pence Bucks Mayo Clinic’s Mandatory Mask Policy During Visit
Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday opted not to wear a face mask during a visit to the Mayo Clinic’s campus in Minnesota, bucking the organization’s mandatory masking policy amid the pandemic.
Video showed Pence, whose face was fully exposed, surrounded by masked staff members and a masked patient while touring the clinic. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the patient was infected with the coronavirus.
The Mayo Clinic informed Pence of the masking policy prior to his visit, the organization tweeted Tuesday. The tweet has since been deleted, but the clinic confirmed to HuffPost that it shared the masking policy with the vice president’s office.
Wall Street Journal reporter Gordon Lubold, who was present for the vice president’s visit, tweeted that the clinic made it clear that everyone should wear a mask.
The clinic’s website states that all patients, visitors and staff are required to wear a mask on campus in an effort to curb the contagion.
“Please bring your own face mask or covering to wear,” the website states.
Neither Pence’s office nor the Mayo Clinic immediately responded to HuffPost’s requests for comment.
Pence defended his choice, however, while speaking to White House pool reporters Tuesday afternoon.
“As vice president of the United States, I’m tested for the coronavirus on a regular basis, and everyone who is around me is tested for the coronavirus,” Pence said.
“And since I don’t have the coronavirus, I thought it’d be a good opportunity for me to be here, to be able to speak to these researchers these incredible health care personnel and look them in the eye and say thank you.”
President Donald Trump earlier this month announced guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that recommended people wear cloth face masks in public settings where social distancing may be difficult to maintain.
Trump, however, said that he did not plan to follow the guidance.
“I don’t think I’m going to be doing it,” Trump said during a news briefing at the White House on April 3. “Wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens — I just don’t see it.”
via: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pence-face-mask-mayo-clinic_n_5ea875c7c5b6550571e96927
Photo Credit: huffpost.com
102-year-old woman has survived cancer, sepsis, miscarriages, Spanish flu and now coronavirus
(Meredith) — Angelina Friedman is quite the fighter. The 102-year-old New York woman has survived cancer, sepsis, miscarriages, and two pandemics.
“She has superhuman DNA,” Joanne Merola told WPIX-TV while marveling at her mother’s endurance.
Friedman (née Sciales) was born in 1918 on a passenger ship bringing immigrants from Italy to New York City during the second wave of the Spanish flu pandemic.
“Her mother died giving birth on the ship, and she was taken care of by her two sisters,” said Merola.
According to the World Health Organization, the Spanish flu infected about a third of the world’s population, and roughly 50 million people died from it.
Decades later, Friedman has survived a second pandemic: COVID-19.
She tested positive for the virus on March 21 after she went to a hospital for a minor medical procedure. She left the hospital a week later and returned to the North Westchester Restorative Therapy and Nursing Center in Lake Mohegan.
After quarantining in her nursing home room for weeks, she finally tested negative for the virus on April 20.
“My mother is a survivor,” Merola said. “She’s survived miscarriages, internal bleeding, and cancer.”
Merola hasn’t been able to visit her mother since February. Because Friedman is nearly deaf, they can’t speak on the phone. So, the nurses are keeping Merola updated on her mother’s progress.
“They tell me she’s doing great. She’s up and about as much as possible,” Merola said. “If my mother could see this, I’d tell her, ‘You keep going, Ma. You’re gonna outlive us all.’”
Friedman has outlived her husband and 10 siblings.
Photo Credit: kmov.com
Neighbors meet during the coronavirus quarantine, find out they’re related
(CNN) — Kjetil and Zoe Njoten live four houses away from Erik and Jen Strom in the Los Angeles area, but the couples had never talked beyond the occasional “Hi” or a friendly wave.
They bonded — from a safe distance — at an impromptu neighborhood get-together this month over their shared Norwegian heritage.
Kjetil Njoten grew up on Njoten Island in Norway. Both Erik Strom’s and Jen Strom’s families are from the country.
Jen Strom’s family came from a town a couple hours away from where Kjetil Njoten grew up — a coincidence on its own.
Erik Strom told Kjetil Njoten that his family came from a small island that they’d never been able to find, Njoten said.
“They thought it was named Newton, which to us clearly wasn’t a Norwegian name,” Njoten told CNN’s “New Day.”
They joked that maybe the family came from Njoten Island, which can be pronounced like “Newton.” The island is only home to a couple dozen people.
“Wouldn’t it be even crazier if we were actually related, somehow,” Erik Strom said.
Strom said he called his mom to check their family history book, which traces her lineage back to the 1700s.
She texted a picture of his great-great-grandfather. His last name was also Njoten.
They sent that information to Kjetil Njoten’s mom, who was able to confirm the family connection.
It turns out that Kjetil Njoten and Erik Strom have the same great-great grandfather.
And their great-great grandfather lived in same house where Kjetil Njoten grew up 100 years later.
“So a crazy coincidence,” Njoten said.
They’re looking forward to spending more time together once the safer-at-home restrictions are lifted.
“Me and Jen were just squealing and jumping around and all of us were beaming with smiles and desperate to hug but can’t,” Zoe Njoten said.
Jen Strom said they’re planning a “huge family meal, a big party,” adding she’s been practicing making some Norwegian delicacies.
Erik Strom said he’s got lots of relatives looking forward to meeting the Njotens.
“There are people from all over the country who are related to us who are interested in coming out and meeting and just participating in the story,” Erik Strom said.
The Stroms have a 4-year-old daughter, and the Njotens have a 10-year-old son.
“My son is so excited that he’s got a new cousin on the street to play with, eventually,” Zoe Njoten said.
Women are getting abortions from home during coronavirus quarantine
Fifty years ago, women were still fighting for their legal right to an abortion. Now, it can all be arranged online.
A new service called TelAbortion connects women looking to terminate their pregnancies with a doctor who can virtually prescribe miscarriage-inducing pills to take at home, the New York Times reports.
And as the coronavirus lockdown stretches into its third month, women are looking to use the telemedicine option more than ever because of limited access to clinics, especially in conservative states.
Throughout March and April, TelAbortion — which is offered in 13 states — helped twice as many women obtain abortions than in January and February, the report states. As of April 22, the service had confirmed 611 completed abortions.
Ashley Dale, of Hawaii, opted to use the service because of the expenses of traveling to a clinic in Honolulu 200 miles away.
“The alternative would be to wait for a doctor to come to my island in three weeks,” Dale, 35, told a TelAbortion doctor. But by then, she would be past the allowed limit of 10 weeks pregnant to use the pills. “It’s not like it was easy … but at the same time it’s pretty clearly the right choice.”
Another woman used TelAbortion because she didn’t want to face the protesters outside her local Planned Parenthood in Salem, Oregon.
“I just don’t want to deal with that ridicule,” Dawn, 30, tells the Times. One woman made the call from a parking lot while sitting in her car.
Some women are even traveling to one of the 13 states where TelAbortion is offered in order to be eligible for the pills. The trend is picking up even more during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We have had patients who cross state lines in order to receive TelAbortions,” Dr. Elizabeth Raymond, senior medical associate at Gynuity Health Projects, which runs the program, tells the Times. Earlier this month, a Texas woman drove 10 hours in the snow to New Mexico and stayed in a motel just to receive the pills.
Once women are approved for the abortion, a package is sent to their homes and is comprised of two pills — mifepristone, which blocks the hormone that causes pregnancy to mature, and misoprostol, which helps the body get rid of fetal tissue. Women often experience cramping and bleeding.
TelAbortion charges about $200 to $375 for consultations and pills, which come in a package with tea bags, peppermints, maxi pads, prescription ibuprofen and nausea medication.
The Food and Drug Administration is allowing the service to operate.
via: https://nypost.com/2020/04/28/women-are-getting-abortions-from-home-during-quarantine/
Photo Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
Florida man claims guns found in car belonged to his cousin ‘John Wick’
A Florida man allegedly tried to blame a weapons bust on John Wick, the legendary assassin played by Keanu Reeves in the eponymous movie franchise, according to a new report.
Cops confronted Getro Gelin, 27, at his Port St. Lucie home Sunday after a woman told police he shoved her to the ground and threatened her with a firearm, according to an arrest affidavit obtained by The Smoking Gun.
The woman told authorities Gelin may have stashed the weapon in his Porsche SUV, according to the report. Cops searched the vehicle and found a Glock 21 pistol, a semi-automatic rifle, and a bulletproof vest, according to the report.
When cops asked Gelin to explain, he explained that the SUV wasn’t even his anymore — he’d sold it “to his cousin John Wick,” according to the affidavit.
He later admitted the John Wick reference was a lie, but “would not reveal his cousin’s name,” authorities said.
Gelin was arrested for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and domestic battery, according to the report.
He is being held in the county jail in lieu of $3,500 bond.
via: https://nypost.com/2020/04/28/florida-man-claims-guns-found-in-car-belonged-to-his-cousin-john-wick/
Photo Credit: Port St. Lucie Sheriff
German doctors pose naked to protest protective equipment shortages
A website apparently featuring photos of German medical workers is calling attention to the working conditions and protective equipment needed by frontline workers amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The website, “Blanke Bedenken,” shows photos of apparently nude people, some of whom are partially obscured by medical equipment, paperwork and other props, including stethoscopes, anatomical skeletons and even toilet rolls.
“We are your GPs. To be able to treat you safely, we need protective gear. When we run out of the little we have, we look like this,” the organizers say in a statement on their website.
As the coronavirus pandemic spreads around the world, healthcare workers on the frontline of the fight against Covid-19 in countries around the world have warned of shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE).
“We are all vulnerable. Medical practices need more support from politics,” the Blanke Bedenken group added.
CNN was not independently able to confirm the authenticity of the site, or the specific affiliations of any of the people pictured on the site. Representatives of the site have not responded to CNN’s request for an interview, and it is not clear which institution or government agency they view as the party responsible for the equipment they say they are lacking. An inquiry to their website resulted in an automated response about the volume of inquiries.
“Due to worldwide rapid rise of Covid-19 infection numbers the demand for medical supplies, such as gloves, breathing masks, protective clothing and ventilators, increased. This led to worldwide supply shortages,” a spokesman for Germany’s Federal Ministry of Health told CNN in a statement.
“In cooperation with a German logistics provider the Federal Ministry of Health organizes the distribution of the medical supplies to the Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians and the federal states. By the end of last week the Federal Ministry of Health had distributed round about 133 million protective masks,” the spokesman added.
On Monday, Germany received a shipment of 10 million face masks from China, and two further flights chartered by the German military are expected to deliver another 15 million protective masks as the wearing of masks has become mandatory in many public spaces across the country.
From last week, many of the restrictions on public life that were designed to halt the spread of coronavirus were loosened in the country. Shops no larger than 800 square meters (8,600 sq. ft.) were allowed to reopen, as were car dealers and bicycle stores, regardless of size.
According to the latest figures from Johns Hopkins University, there have been more than 159,000 reported cases of coronavirus in Germany. There have been more than 6,000 deaths.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has cautioned against complacency, telling Germany’s parliament that the country is “still at the beginning” of the coronavirus crisis and will have to live with the virus for a long time. “Nobody likes to hear this but it is the truth. We are not living through the final phase of this crisis,” she said last week.
via: https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/german-doctors-pose-naked-protest-200816610.html
Photo Credit: Blanke Bedenken / Blanke Bedenken
Maitreyi tackles Desi American teenhood in Mindy Kaling’s new Netflix series
“How has this not happened already?” Maitreyi Ramakrishnan said. “It’s not, you know, some small group of people. For me, being Tamil, we’re all over the world.”
When Maitreyi Ramakrishnan’s friend Shaharah Gaznabbi sent her a screenshot of Mindy Kaling’s tweet calling for South Asian girls to audition for a new Netflix show last year, she said yes. The honest reason, she said, was mostly that she wanted to hang out with her best friend, whom she hadn’t seen in a while.
It turned out that this spontaneous energy made her a good fit for the character, whose impulsiveness sometimes gets her into trouble. Luckily for Ramakrishnan, it helped her land her first acting job — the lead role in Kaling’s and Lang Fisher’s coming-of-age series “Never Have I Ever,” premiering Monday on Netflix.
The show, loosely based on Kaling’s childhood, centers on Devi Vishwakumar, an Indian American high school sophomore who is dealing with the grief of her father’s sudden death while navigating ordinary high school troubles: grades, fitting in and, most important, boys. The comedy is fresh and uniquely Gen Z, incorporating aspects of pop culture like the CW’s “Riverdale” and a knockoff version of TikTok in different scenes.
Reconciling trauma and everyday life is seen through the lens of an Indian American teenager, rebelling against her overprotective mother to go to parties and drink.
It’s one of the first times a South Asian girl’s story has been the center of a U.S. television show. Ramakrishnan, a Tamil Canadian from Mississauga, Ontario, said she’s excited to provide this representation.
“How has this not happened already?” she asked. “It’s not, you know, some small group of people. For me, being Tamil, we’re all over the world.”
She recalls how her spur-of-the-moment audition went down. Ramakrishnan and her friend went to their local library, figured out how to use her mom’s camera and sent in a video. A week later, she was asked to send in four more. Ramakrishnan, who was then 17, had acted in her high school’s theater productions, but she had never held any kind of job before.
“When they asked me to send in more, I honestly thought that they set the bar really low and they had low expectations, so I did not think much of it,” Ramakrishnan, who is now 18, told NBC Asian America. “But a week after that, after sending in four more videos, they asked me to come to L.A. for a screen test. And that’s when me and my best friend lost our minds.”
After auditioning in Los Angeles, Ramakrishnan found out that she had gotten the lead. Ramakrishnan said Kaling told her that her ability to bring herself to the character from the get-go was a major factor in her being chosen among 15,000 other applicants. She was able to give her input into what Devi said and how she reacted to keep the character realistic.
Devi is a bold, nerdy overachiever who desperately wants to shrug off the past year’s trauma and become cool and popular. She enlists her two best friends, Fabiola and Eleanor, in the ploy, picking boyfriends for them and trying to wangle invitations to parties. She tries to distract herself from her father’s recent death by pursuing an older, extremely sought-after boy at her high school.
While Devi’s Indian heritage isn’t necessarily the focus of the series, it’s certainly present in the first season. It can be seen in the Vishwakumar family’s nightly dinners, when they might eat dosa and sambar, and in Devi’s cousin Kamala’s fretting about her parents arranging her marriage.
It’s also apparent in more nuanced ways. Devi’s struggles with her own connection to Indian culture are evident when the family attends the annual Ganesh Puja, a Hindu festival celebrating the god Ganesha. She is visibly uncomfortable wearing a traditional sari, and when she runs into her friend Harish, who has returned from Stanford to attend the puja, she’s surprised to hear that he genuinely wanted to come to the “lame-fest.”
When Devi tells Harish that she can’t wait to move away to college, become an atheist and eat cheeseburgers with a white boyfriend, he says that he used to relate but that his Native American roommate’s connection to his own culture made him reassess. He tells her that even though he used to make fun of the puja every year, he doesn’t want to be an “insecure Indian guy who hates doing Indian things,” and Devi unconvincingly asserts that that’s not how she feels and quickly heads off.
Throughout the episode, Devi seems to feel out of place among the other Indian Americans. She makes fun of a group of girls around her age doing an Indian dance performance and gets scolded by a dancer’s sister. Later during the puja, she talks to a college counselor — the white husband of an auntie — who tells her that without her using her father’s death as a selling point, he doesn’t see how she’s different from other Indian teenagers applying to college.
“I’m not like any other Indian kid, and I’m not interesting just because my dad died,” she says.
Ramakrishnan said she was able to draw on her own experiences as a first-generation South Asian growing up in Canada.
“Like Devi, I had to figure out where I stood with my own culture, and that’s something she goes through in the series,” Ramakrishnan said. “Which is really interesting, because it hasn’t been talked about in film and Western film, being first generation. And now we’re bringing that to light and we’re having that conversation, which is important.”
Ramakrishnan also pulled from her own social circle while playing Devi. In the initial teaser trailer for “Never Have I Ever,” Devi is seen kneeling before several Hindu gods, saying, “What’s poppin’?” Ramakrishnan said the phrase made its way from her group of friends to the show.
“I used to always say that on set, and slowly but surely Mindy and Lang started putting that into the actual script,” Ramakrishnan said.
She was able to finish out high school as a normal student. She found out that she had landed the role in May, graduated in June and began filming in July. At Kaling’s request, she kept the secret for two months, telling only her best friend.
“I really got to live out my high school life normally, getting ready, you know, for prom and commencement, but then just knowing ‘OK , this is going to happen. Get ready,'” Ramakrishnan said.
Ramakrishnan wants to continue to pursue acting. While sheltering in place with her family in Mississauga, she’s reading scripts, looking for more projects to dive into and playing Animal Crossing with her brother and mom.
She said other South Asian girls who want to pursue careers that aren’t seen as traditional in their communities should go for it, because if they don’t, they’ll regret it.
“It’s never too late to pursue something, because no path is ever the right way,” Ramakrishnan said. “There’s no one conventional path to go about doing something.”
Article via NBCNews
Is the ‘fox eye challenge’ racist? Why some Asians are giving the side eye to social media trend popularised by stars like Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner
Article via SCMP
- The look, with almond-shaped eyes lifted at the outer corners, is inspired by celebrities like Bella Hadid, and tips to recreate the look are popular on TikTok
- Asians have taken to social media to call the trend out for its replication of a facial feature that, growing up, they were bullied for having
The “fox eye challenge” is a social media trend inspired by famous women, including model Bella Hadid and actress Megan Fox, who have almond-shaped eyes lifted at the outer corners to smouldering effect. The trend’s hashtag, #foxeye, has gained more than 10.1 million views on TikTok alone.
Ways to achieve the desired look include shaving off the eyebrows after the arch and redrawing them, and applying a heavy-handed cat eye with eyeliner.Shaving off the end of the brow creates a straight which makes the face appear narrower, while redrawing them with an upwards slant creates the illusion of upturned eyes. Bella Hadid uses thick black liner to make her eyes appear elongated.
Other women use more drastic measures such as brow lifts or thread lifts, in which temporary sutures lift the skin and pull the eyes into the desired shape.
The trick for success, as many videos have pointed out, is to make sure the brow is shaved from the point directly above the outer rim of the pupil, while the winged liner should be drawn at a 45-degree angle.
To complete the look, one can also contour the cheekbones and nose to create a sharper, more pointed face shape.
View this post on Instagram A post shared by mar! (@martincantos) on Dec 11, 2019 at 2:05pm PST
The fox eye look has inspired a popular photo pose, in which people deliberately pull at their eyes with their fingers and smoulder at the camera. The pose has rubbed many the wrong way.
TikTok star Melody Nafari’s (@melodynafarii) video of herself posing in this way has gained more than 1 million views and thousands of comments. Some have come from Asian social media users, such as one calling herself Sheena, who remarked: “I remember when I was in primary [school] people were making fun of Asian eyes doing this, now it’s a trend.”
Asian-American TikTok user Melissa (@chunkysdead) has been vocal about how uncomfortable the trend makes her, explaining that seeing its popularity with Caucasians – who used to pull the same face to mock her for her heritage – was unpleasant.
Just as “dimpleplasty”, a type of plastic surgery used to create dimples on the cheeks, became popular after the angelic big eye-look of Australian model Miranda Kerr was all the rage about five years ago, this look’s popularity has popularised blepharoplasty – plastic surgery that modifies the eyes.
Angelo Tsirbas, an ophthalmologist in Sydney, Australia, told Beautycrew.au that the looks of Kendall Jenner, Hadid and the Kardashians are the ones most requested by his plastic surgery patients.
This slanted-eyes trend may not have deliberately emulated the characteristic Asian feature, but many Asians see it as an act of appropriation that ignores the racism and discrimination many have faced in Western countries and communities.
View this post on Instagram throwback A post shared by Kylie (@kyliejenner) on Mar 22, 2020 at 10:28am PDT They have called the trend out for turning one of their largest childhood insecurities and traumas – their looks – on its head. Where they used to be teased and bullied for their features, how they look is now considered a new standard of beauty.
Kim Hee-jae, a student at University of California, Davis, in the United States said she was mocked in the streets by strangers for her eye shape and called a Chink, an offensive word for a Chinese person. She says that she finds it “amazing how opinion of Asians has changed so swiftly”.
“Is being Asian a trend now? It kind of feels like it is … The fox eye thing itself is probably just an aesthetic, like a beauty trend, not racism. But it doesn’t mean that we [the Asian community] don’t feel slighted. They used to insult us for that.”
Some Asians view the trend positively. John Son, a second-generation Asian-American high school student, says he feels good that Asians are gaining popularity and are being seen in a positive light.
“I feel like we’ve become the cool kids – we used to want [to be seen as more white] but now it’s the opposite, especially because of social media. So like, in the current generation of teens, everyone is more accepting and we take things as jokes, at face value. We don’t get so pressed.
“Beauty trends are just that. Trends that come and go. We’re all just people underneath it all, and I think people are starting to see that.”
‘The Goonies’ Cast Reunites 35 Years Later Thanks to Josh Gad
The cast of The Goonies reunited for the first time in more than 30 years — courtesy of Frozen star and Goonies superfan Josh Gad — to reflect on their 1985 classic, reenact beloved scenes and truffle shuffle for a good cause. (The reunion is in support of The Center for Disaster Philanthropy‘s ongoing coronavirus efforts.)
Castmembers Sean Astin, Corey Feldman, Martha Plimpton, Josh Brolin and the rest of the gang were joined by “surprise guests” Cyndi Lauper (who sang the movie’s theme), screenwriter Chris Columbus, director Richard Donner and executive producer Steven Spielberg.
Naturally, talk turned to a sequel, with Spielberg teasing future treasure hunts: “Every couple of years, we come up with an idea but then it doesn’t hold water. The problem is the bar that all of you raised on this genre, I don’t think we’ve really successfully been able to find an idea that is better than The Goonies that we all made in the ’80s. Until we do, people are just going to have to look at this one 100 times.”
This reunion is the first of Gad’s weekly YouTube series, Reunited Apart. As for why he chose Goonies to kick it off? “There is one movie that defines my childhood. One movie that defines my personality. One movie that defines me,” he said.
Article via Click2Houston
Facebook will stream a virtual graduation ceremony featuring Oprah and Miley Cyrus
As dates for reopening the country are continually pushed back, virtually every aspect of life has been disrupted. Holidays, birthdays, weddings and funerals have begun to be virtualized in order for attendees to maintain social distances. It’s an inevitability the class of 2020 has no doubt been dreading for months.
Here’s some consolation from Facebook: a virtual graduation ceremony. The social media giant is bringing out some heavy hitters for the event, too. Oprah Winfrey will be giving the commencement address, while Awkwafina, Jennifer Garner, Lil Nas X and Simone Biles will all be giving speech. Miley Cyrus is set to perform.
The event kicks off at 11AM PT/2PM ET on May 15 via the Facebook Watch App. Four days prior, Instagram will start showing daily videos “that spotlights iconic senior experiences — from ‘most likely’ votes to portrait showcases to senior skip day.” The company will also be offering features to host a “virtual graduation ceremony and party” on the site.
Other sites are holding similar events. Also on May 15, Her Campus will host I’m Still Graduating, featuring appearances by Eva Longoria, Radhika Jones, Margaret Cho, Brooke Baldwin, Liam Payne, Jesse McCartney, Andrew Yang and Tamron Hall. Many schools are also planning their own, less star-studded events to celebrate graduations remotely.
It has to be a bit heartbreaking to do all of this stuff through social medium, Zoom and the like. But for the time being, that’s just going to have to be the virtual world we live in.
Article via TechCrunch